Lincoln Parish deer measures 161 7/8 inches Boone & Crockett.
Carl “Squeaky” Dupre owes his friend Gary Larousse big-time.
Dupre helps his buddy out every year with various projects on his Lafourche Parish deer land, and in exchange, Larousse invites him on several hunts throughout the season.
That’s just fine, because by his own admission, Dupre isn’t much of a deer slayer.
“I’m more of a birdwatcher,” he joked. “I like to look at deer more than I like to shoot them.”
That proved true last Wednesday (Dec. 7), when Dupre watched a nice buck feed and hang out with a fat doe. He was having fun watching them, and never once considered pulling the trigger.
Two days later, Dupre was in a box stand on Larousse’s property when another doe came out and fed for several minutes.
The hunter/birdwatcher shoots a .257 Weatherby with a powerful 6-18 variable scope, and entertained himself by zooming in on the deer, and pretending to take neck, head and eye shots.
“She kept walking around, and I kept following her with the scope,” Dupre recounted. “She walked so far that I had to move the rifle to another window.”
Not long after making the move – at 4:50 p.m. – Dupre was peering through the scope at the doe when the deer scooted forward.
“All of a sudden, a buck moves into my bulls-eye,” he said. “I saw the long horn, then the head, then the neck, then I shot.
“It was literally that fast.”
The doe ran crazily, first moving in its initial direction, and then doubling back across the shooting lanes, but the buck was nowhere to be found.
“It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to get nervous,” Dupre said. “I saw the deer, and within two seconds, I shot the deer. It was that quick.”
But his calm demeanor didn’t last. Within minutes after the shot, Dupre was a quaking mess.
“It started getting dark, so I had to get down and see if I could find this deer,” he said.
The tract is more swamp than actual land, and the buck had been positioned in a wet part of Dupre’s view, so the hunter strapped up his hip boots, and waded in the direction where he had last seen the buck.
“I looked back at the stand when I was about a hundred yards away,” he said. “I looked back when I was 125 yards away – still no deer.
“I started thinking, ‘Man, did I miss him?’ Then, all of a sudden, I saw a horn. I walked over there, and started counting: 2, 4, 6, 8, wow!”
Dupre’s phone lacked service that deep in the swamp, so he was unable to contact Larousse. Finally, when Dupre’s host showed up, the successful hunter downplayed the kill.
“He said, ‘Was that you who shot?'” Dupre recounted. “I said, ‘Yeah, I got a spike.’ “He said, ‘All those deer you see, and you’re going to shoot a spike?’
“Then he walked over and saw it. He couldn’t believe it.”
Larousse had never seen the deer before, and had no idea it was in the area.
The hunters later taped the beast out at 154, a remarkable animal for the swamps of Lafourche Parish.
“An old-timer who’s been hunting back there all his life saw the deer, and said, ‘Son, you just hit the Power Ball,'” Dupre said.
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